RETURN TO THE NOVEL OF CONTEMPORARY LIFE. Scott's influence on file novel is not summed up by giving a list of his imitators or of those writers who discovered new romantic themes. He is in Thomas Hardy's woodland scenes as much as in Stevenson's Master of liallanlrue. lIe de picted the showy virtues, vices, and scenes in his outer plot, but beneath there was always careful observation of CO111111011 life. ''brow Off the outer covering, and you have the realistic novel. This was done by several writers, as Susan Ferrier, John Galt, and D. Al. .Moir, who wrote capital sketches of Scotch manners. Throw out the his torical setting, and you have once more the novel of contemporary manners. The transition is well marked by the work of D11lwer-Lytton. Likewise Charles Kingsley romanced the sea and ancient history Bo! and llypatiii) and dealt with the social conditions of his own time ( Yeast and Alton Lucke). But the immediate vogue of romance and history hail already been checked. In France, llahzac was insisting, in theory and in practice, that the novel should be a document based upon experience and observation. Ralzac's vast Comi'dic h umaine, aiming to represent every phase of French life, worked mightily in Eng land, and gave fiction everywhere an encyclopaedic character. In England the novel returned to the humors of society with Pickwick (183(i-37). In this novel of great scope (for it contains more than 350 characters) appear the London cock neys. Having discovered London. Dickens went on to illustrate it in all its phases, and to in clude in his canvas much from the provinces, 1111111 lie had (Tented caricature types running into the thousands. Thackeray wrote Vanity Fair (1847-48). Instead of a Little Nell, lie took as heroine Becky Sharp. and made her ad ventures the medium for depicting, the ways of the middle class. This novel was followed by Pendrunis, The Esmond, The Virgin ians, and The Adventures of Philip. All possess 'xqtkite humor and irony. In their somewhat loose structure they lean to the epic. Ilut the method of procedure is dramatic. No other novelist has evcr come near Thackeray in making his characters develop from page to page; witness both Becky Sharp and Bowdon Crawley.
At this time George Borrow was writing his eccentric gypsy novels. Larengro (1851) and Romany Eye (1857) , and Charles Reade was Will Ding popularity. The way im which Heade awl Dickens put together the novel of social satire was very displeasing to Anthony Trollope, who accused them of (treating vices in the upper and middle classes merely to attack them. His ideal
of a novel Troli,,p. prcsoulcI in the Chronicles of Barsetshire (1853•(77). comprising Thr Ward,a. Tow, rs, !Motor Thorne. Framley Par swinge, The Small Ilmise at Allington, and Thr Last Chronicle of Barsul. In this imaginary shire, he describes the elergy and their friends with a humor, running now and then into farce. Trollope brings hi. charneters di reetly before 111c render and lets them play out the drama. ?0 one ever forgets characters like slit inn's ]larding. Mrs. Browne, and Arch Grantley.
Tut: l'srcuot ornevt, Novm.. Corresponding with the sequence of incident there is a sequence of thought and emotion. Lay the stress on incident and you have the romance or the novel of man. tiers; ]ay it on the inner life and you have the psyehologieal novel. Since Defoe. the novel had to an extent swung between these two methods.
But the psychological novel hardly became aware of itself before the middle of the nineteenth cen tipy. Hawthorne comes to the fore. Alike in his longer and shorter tales, as The ,,Vcarlet Lcitcr and The Great Mow: Face (1850), he probes the conscience. Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1848) is an intense lyric. Likewise in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyr€, (1547) and 1 illutic (1853) what holds one spellbound is the spiritual life externalized in incident. Here, too, the work of Elizabeth Gaskell, best known as the author of Cranford, has significance. In her Ruth (1853) she employed for unifying the plot an ethical formula which may be styled the doctrine of the act and its consequences. But the memorable date in the history of the psychological novel is 1859. In that year appeared George Eliot's Adam Pcdc and George Aleredith's Ordeal of Richard Feverel. lm her first long story George Eliot kept in harmony the inner and the outer life; and each added to the interest of the other, Certainly after The Mill on the Floss (18(i0), ineident was no longer able to sustain the phi losophy. And yet Uotnota (1863) and Middle march (1S71-72) are her most relentless studies in moral decay. All her novels are constructed on some variant of the doctrine of the deed and its consequences. George :Meredith selects a small group of characters in a clearly defined situation—as in The Egoist (1879) and Diana (18851—and then studies minutely their be havior. His view is less comprehensive than George Eliot's, but his analysis is more subtle.